


Tell your white knight, he's handsome in hindsight

by heavenisalibrary



Series: Tumblr Prompt Fills [10]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-21
Updated: 2014-03-21
Packaged: 2018-01-16 11:57:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1346623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavenisalibrary/pseuds/heavenisalibrary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Once upon a time there was a Sad Man in a rickety blue box that was so empty inside it could swallow things many times its size. The Sad Man went all through the universe, collecting people to stuff inside his blue box, hoping they would fill up the empty spaces."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tell your white knight, he's handsome in hindsight

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: doctor/river - fairy tale? 
> 
> Five fairy tales/bedtime stories told about the Doctor and River.

— I —

“Once upon a time there was a Sad Man in a rickety blue box that was so empty inside it could swallow things many times its size. The Sad Man went all through the universe, collecting people to stuff inside his blue box, hoping they would fill up the empty spaces, and they did, for a while. The Sad Man and his friends would travel through time and space and have adventures, but every time they returned to the blue box the Sad Man noticed it had grown larger. There were rooms he didn’t remember having, hallways that never seemed to end. Sometimes he lost people in the blue box — sometimes they left him, too afraid of what the might find behind all of those doors — but always the Sad Man ended up alone again in his box, growing bigger and bigger every day.”

“Why did the box grow?”

“It was a blue box, Alice,” her father said, brushing a lock of hair behind her ear. “Blue’s the saddest color in the universe. It’s the color of loneliness.”

“But he had all of those friends traveling with him — how could the Sad Man feel lonely with all of those people with him?”

“Sometimes, if you keep everything bottled up inside you, you can grow a completely different world within your own little body, did you know? It gets bigger and bigger, like the blue box — a whole world made out of feelings you don’t share, thoughts you’re too scared to speak, regrets you wish you didn’t have. And if it’s all inside of you, nobody else can see it, can they?”

“I suppose not.”

“The blue box was kind of like that. Built out of all of the Sad Man’s worst moments and thoughts, and even though he had friends, he was too scared to show them what was really within him. He thought it would scare them away, and his emptiness grew and grew with the blue box until his friends felt the emptiness too, or it ate them up, and then the Sad Man was alone again.”

“That’s terrible.”

“It is, darling,” said her father. “That’s why you must always tell me everything. Except when you get a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend. I don’t want to know anything about that.”

“Dad, gross. What happened to the Sad Man?”

“He met a Mad Woman. She was clever and strong and smiled like a shark, and she pulled the Sad Man into her adventures. She grabbed his hand and ran and ran through starscapes and milky ways and planet rings, and when she was done dragging him through the universe, she followed him into his big blue box and made him show her every inch of it. They spent many years wandering those corridors, visiting rooms while he talked to her and she listened. Sometimes it hurt the Sad Man, showing the Mad Woman the ghost of one of his old friends lingering in the depths of his box, but the Mad Woman would pull out one of her ghosts and set it free next to his own. In that way over many years, the empty blue box filled itself up. It became bright and alive with laughter and joy and life, and when they were finally through, she wasn’t so mad and he wasn’t so sad.”

“What did they call each other, then?” Alice asked.

“Their names, I expect,” said her father with a laugh. “Their real names — not the names others had given them, because those are never quite right —”

“Yeah, Alice is a real doozy —”

“— but their true names. The names they’d chosen themselves.”

“And then?”

“Oh, you know the rest,” her father said, kissing her on the forehead and pulling her blanket up tightly around her.

“And then they lived happily ever after,” Alice finished.

— II —

Mels didn’t remotely like her foster mother’s sister. She was a loud woman with a crooked nose, a smug air, and far too many teeth. She dressed in nice, though slightly odd, clothes, but the woman’s hands were rough and calloused with dirt under the nails, and so Mels knew she wasn’t nearly as fancy as she pretended to be. What was even more annoying to Mels was that the woman wasn’t even her foster mother’s sister — she was just some old friend who stopped in sometimes to give Mels annoying advice that she didn’t really want and laugh at anything Mels said to try and make her uncomfortable enough to leave Mels alone.

Tonight, the insufferable woman — who had a fancy degree of some kind, and so insisted that Mels call her Professor — was basically babysitting Mels, which was funny not least because Mels was not nearly so young as she looked, but because she was basically a trained assassin — still, she wasn’t supposed to cause any trouble with the foster family. Last time she’d gotten thrown out, there had been consequences. She still had the scars to prove it.

“Wine?” the Professor asked, pouring herself a generous glass.

Mels raised a brow. “I’m not usually allowed to drink.”

“I’m sure that doesn’t stop you,” said the Professor, pouring a second glass and setting it on the table across from where she was sitting. Mels hesitated a second before sighing and sitting down in front of it.

“No, but usually I go for strong stuff. Things you can get properly drunk off of,” Mels said. She drained the glass in one go, watching the Professor carefully, but as usual, she just smiled.

“I used to be the same way,” the Professor said. “Old age mellows a person.”

“You can’t be that old.”

“Was that a compliment?”

“No. I just meant — I didn’t… Whatever.”

The Professor grinned, taking a sip of her wine.

“I just hate you,” Mels said conversationally, reaching out for the bottle and pouring herself another glass. “More than the foster mum and dad, and I hate them quite a lot.”

The Professor smiled slightly and was quiet for a moment. Mels spent the downtime thinking of the most appalling thing she could possibly say, but before she could utter it, the Professor spoke again. “Want to hear a story?”

“Bloody hell, no.”

“I’m going to tell you anyway,” said the Professor, expression unchanging as Mels poured herself a third glass of wine. “Consider it a bedtime story. Once upon a time —”

“Oh, Christ.”

“—there was a man, and there was a woman. The first time he met her was in the biggest library in the universe, on a planet made out of shelves and books and paper and ink, and she knew everything about him. The first time she met him was during a war and she was too young to later remember it.”

“Not really a meeting then, is it.”

“Well, the first time she remembered meeting him was in Berlin during World War II. They had a fight in Hitler’s office because the man knew her — knew where she came from and where she was going — but she didn’t know him at all. She jumped out of a window that day just so she wouldn’t have to see his face.”

“Is this a riddle? Because I didn’t agree to answer a riddle.”

“Once they fell in love in ancient Rome when he was young and she was somewhere in the middle. Once they spent a year living in an American city, working for a newspaper, when she knew so much more about him than he knew about her — he hadn’t been to Rome yet, hadn’t fallen in love, and so she had to be sure he fell in love all over again. Once they ruled a kingdom on an ice planet for a few months, and he was head over heels for her, but she’d only just done Berlin and could hardly stand to look at him. They spent a whole night talking on a blanket under the stars during a meteor shower, but she didn’t remember the next time he saw her. He spent every Christmas with her parents for half a decade, but sometimes when she invited him, he didn’t know what she was talking about, and she had to wait until she found the right him to ask him home for the holidays. They —”

“Alright, alright, get to the ‘and they lived happily ever after’ bullshit already.”

“Bullshit?”

“If they’re happy,” Mels said, “they clearly haven’t reached the end. There’s no such thing as a happy ending.”

“You’re missing the point.”

Mels drummed her fingers against the table for a moment. “What’s the point, then?”

“That there is no ending. There’s no beginning, either. Lives are in loops, sometimes.”

Mels kept it from showing on her face, but she actually liked the thought — Amy and Rory thought her life was going to be a strict progression of delinquency to jail and possibly to death. Probably most people thought that. She thought it was going to be a strict progression of painful training and misery to killing the Doctor to being killed by the her captors once she was no longer of use; even if she did survive, her life was a pretty determined downhill slope. But if it wasn’t a line – if it was just a bunch of stuff all jumbled up out of order, well. There was possibility there.

Instead of telling the professor that, she stood up and grabbed the bottle of wine, and made her way out of the room. She didn’t see the Professor again until the memories of her Mels regeneration were all settled, years later, and she looked in the mirror.

— III —

Madgela huddled beneath a tattered blanket, her three children facing her. The fire sparked weakly behind them, hopefully providing them more warmth than she herself felt. Their world had been all but destroyed, and every night as they’d lay down to sleep and look up at the sky they could see the planets in their galaxy flickering out as whole solar systems were extinguished in the great battle. By the end of tonight, Madgela thought, their planet would be the only one left in their system.

“They’re coming for us next, aren’t they?” Treth asked his mother.

“Who are?”

“We heard some of the other kids talking,” Jula said, “about what’s happening. Why the stars are going out. They talked about the Doctor.”

Madgela shivered, pulling the blanket more tightly around herself. “They shouldn’t be talking about such things.”

“We want to know,” said Craeta. “We want to know what’s coming.”

“We don’t know, sweethearts,” Madgela said. “There are stories — legends — but no one knows what the truth is. Our planet was attacked when you were all so very small, but it happened so fast, and everyone’s been too afraid to rebuild ever since.”

“Tell us the legends, Mama,” Jula said. “I could use a bedtime story.”

“They aren’t stories of comfort.”

“Tell us all the same,” Jula said.

Madgela found herself relenting. “The legend goes that there was once a Doctor who lived many years in captivity, training to be a dangerous weapon to some very bad people. She was strong, clever, and without compassion. One day, they released her to kill a great warrior who was feared by many, but the Doctor didn’t kill the warrior — she fell in love with him. The Doctor found her match in the warrior: he too was strong, clever, and without compassion. The Doctor ran away with this man, and they got married.

The legend says that in their early days, they were good — they helped people and saved worlds, and helped one another to learn compassion. But their love became a burden — the casualties of helping others weighed on their hearts until they could stand it no longer. One night under a full moon, they each took a knife to their own chest and cut out their hearts. The Doctor placed her still-beating heart into the chest of her husband, and he placed his into hers, and from then on, the only thing they could love was the little piece of themselves that was in the other.

Every time the Doctor and her husband would step out of their terrible ship, the ground would shake beneath their feet, and the earth would crack open beneath the weight of their consciences they did not heed, and the skies would pound and spark with their fury. They brought ugly death to every person they met, and snuffed out the stars, blackening the stars with their violence and selfishness.”

“Is that true, mama?”

“Every story grows from some small truth.”

— IV —

“When I was very small, there was a girl who lived in the trees.”

“Everybody lives in the trees, Lorna.”

“Ah, but the girl lived in the very tops — the trees of the Gamma Forest reach to the sky, and we only build halfway up, far enough from the ground to avoid the lions and tigers and bears that would eat up yummy little boys like you. No one knows where she came from, no one knows when she showed up, and no one really knew what she looked like, either. Sometimes people would swear they saw her, sneaking down a tree trunk to steal some food or water, and that she had beautiful dark skin and sharp, searching eyes that saw right through a person, even though she couldn’t have been more than seven. My cousin Noel said she was probably a teenager with long red hair and millions of freckles. Two months later someone started spreading rumors that they saw the girl leaping overhead from branch to branch wearing a sack like a dress and looking like a queen with her dark hair tied into a knot on top of her head and her skin golden from the sun. No one ever agreed, and for a while people began to think that there were, somehow, many girls, but there was only one. She was a trickster, a stealthy little thing who changed her appearance every couple of months, who became older and younger, living in every color of the rainbow as she jumped from tree to tree.

She lived up there for a few years before people started trying to bring her down. Some of the other kids and I built ladders and laid them against the trees to make it easier for her to get down, but still she would be seen swinging from the branches late at night to steal away the things she needed to live. Then we started leaving food out for her, and water, and sometimes toys and blankets — but still morning would come, and people would murmur about the basket of apples snatched from their counter through a broken window, or the laundry they’d left out to dry going missing. We tried to bring her down in every way that we could think of — even the adults tried to help — but the trickster child still snuck around in her rags, changing her face like the seasons. She lived up there for many years, until he came.”

“The Doctor?”

“Mm, the Doctor. He didn’t come in with his blue box — he said he parked it somewhere else — but flew in on some little ship he’d borrowed from another place, and parked it near the top of the trees and climbed down on the ladders we’d placed for the trickster girl. He brought trouble with him, as doctors often do, and we spent the entire month he was here running along the treetops with him from the bad guys.”

“What bad guys?”

“I’ll tell you all about it when you’re older. But when it was all through, the Doctor asked one of the elders to fly him to where he’d parked his box. I asked him why he didn’t just leave on the ship he’d borrowed, and he’d winked and said he thought someone had already taken it. When I pressed him, he leaned down and very quietly told me that there was someone up there who needed a way out even more than him. I realized he meant the trickster girl, and I begged him to tell me about her — he must have met her, if he gave her his ship, and I always wanted to know who or what she was, and how she’d gotten up there. The Doctor said that he hadn’t met her at all, he’d just left the ship there, knowing she needed a way out.

I told him that we’d been trying to help her for years. We’d left her food, we’d left her blankets. We’d built her ladders to help her get down. He said that, sometimes, people didn’t want to be brought down to the ground, but instead just needed the opportunity to fly.”

“Do you think he’ll remember you when you see him, Lorna?”

“I hope so. I’ve waited many years to see the Doctor again.”

“But you’ll be back from Demon’s Run soon, right? They won’t keep you — it’s just that, you always do well at things. I spend half my time at school rolling my eyes at teachers talking about my big sister Lorna, it’s so annoying. I just mean, they won’t keep you at Demon’s Run, even if you do well, will they? It’s just temporary. Just for training.”

“Of course.”

“Not that I’d miss you.”

“No, of course not.”

“Don’t let them keep you, though. Even if they beg. Make sure you come back.”

“Ah, see, you need to pay better attention. I learned one very important thing from the Doctor and the trickster girl. Do you want to know what it was?”

“Tell me.”

“There’s always a way out.”

— V —

“Once there was a lost little girl who had a different name everywhere she went, and sometimes a different face, too. She lived in different years and worlds and countries but she never got to choose. The people who took care of her decided where she lived and what she was called, and fate decided her face. Nothing was ever up to her until she met a lonely man who showed her a face she would love and let her choose when and where she went and helped her to find the name that was hers. She fell in love with her new self as she fell in love with the lonely man, and married him so that he wasn’t lonely anymore. They spent many years traveling the universe until one day, a baby showed up on their doorstep.”

“Where did they live?”

“On a house on a meteor. Always moving, always changing. Just how they liked it.”

“Must’ve been hard to drop a baby there.”

“Sometimes I think your father is a ventriloquist.”

“Sometimes he thinks he is too,” said the little girl with a roll of her eyes. Her mother laughed.

“He thinks a lot of things,” said her mum. “Half of them are patently false and a whole quarter are only vaguely linked to truth. Haven’t investigated the rest yet.”

The little girls snorted, and her mother brushed back a red curl from her face. “They loved the baby, didn’t they? They were glad they kept her?”

Her mother leaned forward to press a kiss on her forehead. “They love her more than all of time and space.”

Her mother started to leave the room, but the little girl stopped her.

“Mum?”

“Yes?”

“You don’t have to say she got dropped on your doorstep,” said the little girl. “I mean, well, first of all, I know the story’s about you, so you can just use your name because really all of those pronouns are a bit impractical and also, anyway, you know, I know where babies come from.”

“Why on earth do you know that?”

“The TARDIS told me.”

“The TARDIS and I are going to have to have a talk,” her mother said with a stern look that just makes her daughter smile. “You’re too much like your father sometimes.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Take it how you like,” said her mother, “just don’t tell him. We like to keep him humble.”

The little girl laughed. “Goodnight, Mum.”

“Goodnight, sweetie.”


End file.
